From Sea to Shining Sea

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  “Aye,” William said. He knew that was true on the march. “But speakin’ of Pompeii, look at that.”

  Little Pompey, naked, was being laid down on a blanket on the edge of the hot pond by his mother. He squirmed and cooed at the sensations of warmth and dampness. And Sacajawea herself, oblivious to the presence of a dozen soldiers who were lounging around the pool with their feet or arms in the hot water, sat and took off her calf-high moccasins, then stood and pulled her tunic over her head. She stood naked, slim and tawny as a doe, for a moment, while the men got strange, faraway looks in their eyes. Then she picked up the infant and stepped carefully down into the water. Lewis’s face clouded with outrage and he opened his mouth, but William laid a hand on his arm. “She didn’t understand your order,” he said. “Look, neither did Toby.” The old guide, a rack of bone and sinew covered by a map of veins, had cast off his clothes and was stepping into the water on another side of the pool.

  And in a moment the squaw was modestly immersed to her ribs in the water, bathing her child in such a natural and delightful and motherly a way that, if there were any desires stirred in the men by the sight of her, they were only the old, good desires for loving kindness, for comfort, for tenderness.

  A FEW HOURS LATER, WILLIAM FOLLOWED TOBY ONTO A treeless saddle ridge that connected two wooded peaks. William stopped on the ridge, squinting against a damp, chill wind that seemed to rush up over the saddle like draft up a flue, and, clamping his hand over his hat to keep it from sailing off, clenched his teeth and groaned at the sight that spread before him.

  Stretching off to the west, as far as he could see, was a maze of dark, wind-scoured ranges, jagged and long, their steep sides black with tamarack and larch, fir and pine and enormous cedars, with snowy peaks poking up white here and there along the ridges like backbones jutting through an animal’s hide. Down alongside the nearest spur and off westward among the ridges tore a creek wilder and faster and more tortuous than the Lolo. Beyond each shaggy ridge was another ridge, and beyond that, another, each fading a little grayer, away and away; they appeared to be an infinity of mountains, eventually fading into the clouds and hazes and snows of a wintry sky.

  Toby did not stop, but headed down the other side of the ridge.

  Lewis came up beside William, tying his hat on his head by passing a bandanna over it and under his chin. He looked stricken. “I wasn’t expecting this,” he said. “D’ you suppose that Toby really knows a way?”

  “Shhh,” William warned. The men were coming up onto the ridge with them now, and every man had that same stunned look. “Don’t seem to doubt, or they’ll lose heart for certain.”

  No one knew how far these mountains went. The Flatheads at the foot of the pass had said passage would require five days if there was no snow. Old Toby had not forewarned them of this awful spectacle from the top of the Lolo Pass.

  Lewis was looking dubiously down the slope now at the tiny figure of the old Indian, who was standing in a gray-brown meadow, gazing now toward the ranked mountains, now back up to the ridge where the white men stood in the path of the wind. Come on, the attitude of his fragile-looking little body seemed to say. Come on.

  Lewis said again, softly so the men would not hear him doubting: “D’ you really think he knows, or is he lost?”

  William gritted his teeth, suddenly annoyed by this question. It was William who had found the old man and judged him capable and hired him on, and now Lewis was implying that it might have been bad judgment. It was not that William was being blamed for this doubt, not yet anyway, but if Toby did get the expedition lost, William would be held accountable for it in Lewis’s mind, even if Lewis did not, as he probably would not, say anything about it.

  “Just ye look at ’im,” William said in Lewis’s ear. “Does he look like a man who doesn’t know where he’s a-goin’?”

  William himself, looking out over the infinity of hostile mountains, was now something a little short of confident. But he turned to the men, who stood huddling in the lee of the pack horses, and put on his most reassuring Clark grin, and yelled, “Come on, boys! It’s all downhill from here!”

  He was astonished to hear someone—he thought it was Private Potts, but in this wind could not be sure—yell:

  “We heard that before!”

  William gritted his teeth, glanced at Lewis’s angry face, then chose to make it all sound like jest.

  “Aye,” he yelled back, “and ye’ll hear it again till ye know it’s true!” He pointed at the gray sky. “That’s up!” Then he pointed toward the little figure of Toby below. “That’s down! Come on, boys, down we go!”

  THEY DESCENDED FROM THE RIDGE, AND WITHIN A FEW hundred yards found a spring gushing icy water that leaped down this westerly slope and down through a glade that opened onto a large meadow before disappearing into the dense forest. Far below, in a v-shaped chasm whose steep walls were almost black with evergreens, short chutes of the stream could be seen dashing white and tiny down its narrow bed. Bald eagles and ospreys rode the wind above the treetops. The captains named this Glade Creek, and made a camp at the lower end of the meadow. Next morning they ate the rest of the meat, loaded the horses, and started up a steep, high mountain spur.

  On this side of the windy ridge, the forest was so different it was like still another world. This was a wet forest, and it was dense and lush and tangled. Now as well as the familiar pine, tamarack, spruce, and fir, there were tall, delicately shaped larch, enormous cedars a hundred and fifty feet tall, their deep-fissured, gray-barked trunks as much as six feet thick, and giant hemlocks with their bent-over crowns. The trees were like thousands of black-green spires. The earth was damp, grassy in the glades, decorated with huge ferns in the woods. But littie of the ground could be seen in these forests; almost every foot of forest floor was crisscrossed with the gigantic, mossy carcasses of fallen cedars and firs, the older ones half-rotted into the soil, the newer ones in lesser states of decay, the most recent ones often shattered and split by having fallen on the others, or upon boulders; great bare splinters sometimes slanted thirty or forty feet through the ferns. The creek was fed by mossy springs every few feet, thick with beaver-gnawed saplings. The springs and brooklets trilled down through steep gullies, parting and rejoining, sand- and rock-bottomed, bridged by the huge trees that had fallen over them. The Indian trail wound ingeniously among these steepnesses and huge tangles, but every few yards there would be a new tree trunk, split and twisted by the violence of its fall, and these recent obstacles had to be climbed over, walked around, or, sometimes, cut through by axmen. As they labored in these confines, the choppers began to notice an effect of yesterday’s visit at the mineral springs. Their bowels were active and full of gas. They broke wind at each other like bugles, then wheezed with laughter at the sulphurous odors they produced.

  After some four miles of such tortuous labor and climbing, the caravan found itself traveling southwestward along a rocky ridge crest, through stunted and wind-blasted trees, looking far down at one creek on their right and another on their left. Now William, having been in the tangled, choked valleys, could understand why much of the Nez Percé trail seemed to seek ridges. Maybe the wind was as cold and sharp as a knife and the sun seared one’s face without even warming it and there was no water to drink, but there was some open space here to travel through.

  This ridge gave them a rooftop view of the world for a while, but soon the snow-topped mountainous labyrinth ahead grew vague and gray as clouds closed in, and a cold, penetrating rain, mixed with hail, began to pelt them and sting their faces. They bent their heads and went onward, concentrating on the mud and slippery rocks of the ridgetop. The slopes now fell away on both sides for a few hundred feet until they faded into invisibility. The ridge now was like a narrow island in a sea of cold, dank gray witii no horizons and no foundations.

  The ridge ran out, and they came sliding and crashing down out of the clouds in a winding, four-mile descent into the valley. Here the cree
ks they had seen on their left and right converged. They crossed the left fork and immediately began to climb another ridge. “Koos-Koos-Kee,” Toby said, pointing down at the stream.

  It was another four-mile ascent over and around fallen timber, and put them eventually upon another cloud-cloaked ridge. Now they could hear the Koos-Koos-Kee rushing through the gray oblivion far below them on their right. They picked their way along the ridge for another five miles until it began to descend, and again they scrabbled down out of the misty clouds and into the rain-blackened forest, emerging in a marshy valley where two more fast streams converged, now swollen almost to the size of rivers. And now something seemed to be wrong with old Toby. He was as agile as ever, but he was hesitating.

  Lewis came up and put a hand on William’s arm. “Your man,” he said, “is confused.”

  WILLIAM COULD NOT DENY IT NOW. THE OLD INDIAN seemed perplexed by the sight of this second fork. Yet the party had not left the Indian trail. The path could be seen; there were still rubbed places on the bark of the trees in narrow passageways. “We’re on an Indian trail,” William murmured feebly. “But is it the right one?”

  Toby squatted on the rocky bank of the stream that poured in from the left. He tasted a palmful of water and looked up and down. There was a steep, black mountainside rising almost directly from the far side of the valley below the fork, and another climbing ridge on this side. The streams were crystalline, running fast over a bed of jumbled, water-rounded rocks, bluish-green, rust-brown, white-veined, as small as fists and as big as horses.

  Toby got up now and clambered among the boulders, then gave a shout, barely heard over the rush of water. The captains ordered the troop to stay, and took Sacajawea and Charbonneau down to follow him.

  He was pointing at the remains of a lattice of woven willow that lay at a place where rocks had been moved to make a chain of step-stones all the way across the stream. He talked rapidly, often making arching motions with his right hand and touching his lips. After a while Sacajawea and Charbonneau were able to translate. It was a place where Toby’s people came down to catch much salmon in the springtime, he said. That was why there was a trail down to it.

  “And where, pray tell, is the main trail?” Lewis demanded to know. It was getting darker and darker in the gorge.

  Toby looked sad and sheepish. He pointed across the river to the long, high, gloomy wall of mountainside on the right side of the valley, and talked.

  “On up,” Charbonneau interpreted through his squaw.

  “Damnation!” Lewis snapped.

  It had been a bad error. It eventually became clear what had happened. Coming down off that first ridge to the first fork, Toby had come onto several converging trails, two of which led up the spurs onto ridges. In the mist he had taken the left trail instead of the right and had brought them onto the wrong mountain. He had not begun to suspect his error until the unexpected descent to this fork. Lewis’s mouth was bitten pale, a mean slash amid the dark stubble of his whiskers. He looked as if he wanted to kill Toby.

  “It’s a bother,” William soothed him, “but not a hard mistake to comprehend. He doesn’t come through here every day, y’ know.”

  The error would cost them at least another day, they reckoned. They would have to cross the river here, just above its confluence, and then go along the other bank until they found a place where they could climb that dark mountainside and regain the trail on the ridge.

  “At least,” William said, putting a firm hand on Lewis’s shoulder, “we’re not lost.” Lewis seemed less sure of that.

  They forded the icy, roaring north fork in half-light, gettin wet to the waist, and fought their way through darkening, dripping woods, among enormous trees, for two miles before they found a place open enough to camp on. They were famished and almost too fatigued to stand up. The hunters had had no luck; they had only two grouse. These would not have fed two men, as spent and cold as these were.

  “Well, then,” Lewis said, brightening a little, “I reckon it’s time we got into that portable soup we’ve been carryin’ three thousand miles for just such an occasion.” It was another of his prized purchases, and he was as eager to try it as he had been to assemble his iron boat. Water was fetched from the roaring river and kettles were hung on poles over fires. Tins of the stuff—lackluster dried vegetables fortified with iron sulfate—were opened and dumped in, along with the two grouse. The men waited, both eager and dubious, as the stuff softened and clouded the water. Then it was served out into the men’s cups. The first reaction made it clear that it was as poor an experiment as the iron boat had been. Sergeant Gass spat into the fire.

  “By the guts o’ God!” he roared. “It’s puke! It’s portable puke, that’s all it is!”

  Most agreed. “Quick,” someone shouted between gagging sounds, “fish out them grouses afore they git spoilt!”

  There seemed to be as much iron in the soup as there had been in the collapsible boat, and it felt as if it were scouring all the enamel off their teeth. Lewis sat bravely forcing down one spoonful after another, listening to the exaggerated sounds of retching and moaning. William grinned at Lewis, a strange, half-nauseated grin. “Y’ could court-martial ’em for disrespect of army rations, if they weren’t so many in agreement.”

  “Beggin’ your pardon, Captain,” said Ordway, coming around the fire, “the men say this stuff—er, good as it might be—won’t do, chilled an’ tuckered as we all are. They request permission, sir, to butcher a horse.”

  “You know, Ordway, we’ve just enough horses left to carry baggage. We can’t be killing ’em.”

  “Then one o’ the colts, sir. That’s what we brought colts fer.”

  The captains themselves could feel their bodies clamoring for meat. This ghastly vegetable brew might keep them from starving, but would not give them the strength or inner fire they needed in their condition.

  “Permission granted,” Lewis said.

  A wolf was howling down the valley. In the pause between its quavering wild notes, William heard, in the trees just outside the firelight, the ax-blow between the blindfolded eyes, the thud of the falling body as the long-legged colt crumpled to the ground.

  The meat, as Ordway wrote in his journal that night, “eat verry well at this time.” And the creek they had crossed above the camp they named Colt Killed Creek.

  WILLIAM AWOKE IN GRAY LIGHT WITH THE SOUND OF THE river constant in his ears. He saw York moving along the shore, his breath condensing against the dark backdrop of the wooded mountain across the stream, then saw him stooping to gather wood for the morning fire. The route of yesterday’s march was nagging at William’s mind, so he extracted note paper and a pencil from his clothing and made sketches of the way they had come and the way they should have come.

  The party set out after a breakfast of colt meat and picked its way with great difficulty over steep stone spurs and through enormous tangles for about four miles, through groves of great cedars, past several old Indian campsites, until they arrived at a more elaborate salmon-fishing site, where there were remains of many of the willow weirs. Here a much-worn trail turned to the right and led toward the long mountain. The riverbank looking even more impassable ahead, they decided to ascend the mountainside here and regain the main trail along the mountain ridge. They asked Toby about it, and, seeming glad that they still valued his guidance, he said it was the course they should take.

  The trail wormed up a steep, rock-strewn rise about a hundred feet, then the slope became gentler, and on this slope the brush was jungle-thick—willows, alders, little maples, chokeberry, honeysuckle and huckleberry and great ferns—on a spongy, yielding, water-squishy soil almost like peat, mostly of rotting plant fibers. The men and horses were wet constantly by droplets shaken off leaves; their moccasins and the horses’ hooves were stained with black muck. They snaked around fallen cedars and firs and pines for ten minutes, sloshing through springs that ran everywhere; then suddenly found themselves at the base of
a wall of boulders, spruce trees, lodgepole pines and larches: the mountainside itself.

  It was the steepest incline they had encountered anywhere. The Indian trail, probably used only for access to the salmon fishery, could not climb straight up such a grade. Instead, it was a switchback trail, a foot or two wide; it would ascend laterally across the face of the mountain, then double back for twenty to fifty yards, then redouble. At any moment the head of the caravan was looking down onto the hats of a line of men going left below it, farther down, the hats of a line going right, then another going left. Other times the leaders could not see anyone below because of the density of the evergreen foliage.

  The voice of Sergeant Gass, who was bringing up the rear, roared up the trail once: “Potts, ye blaggard! Watch out up there! Your horse just beshit the top o’ my hat!” It got a laugh all up the line, but it was a reminder that if a horse fell here it might well fall on two or three horses or men below.

  The trail was muddy and slippery; sometimes it was blocked by tree trunks that had to be climbed over, by wind-felled pines that had to be ducked under. As horses are not ducking and crawling animals, these latter obstacles created the worst problems. Such trees had to circumvented by wild scrambles almost straight up, to the next level of the path above. Or, if that were simply too steep, the axes would come out and the trunk would be cut through while the whole caravan waited. Sometimes these trunks were three feet thick, and would have required hours to chop or saw through, and when such a one blocked a path, there was nothing to do but cut a shorter zigzag path through the undergrowth and rejoin the Indian path farther up.

  By noon they had traversed back and forth more than a hundred times, climbing five miles by William’s estimate, and still were but halfway up the mountain. He paused at a switchback, sweat steaming in the cold air, and looked down at the tops of trees, at the hats of men, at the packsaddles on horses’ backs, at the thick-timbered spurs and mountainsides and ridges enclosing them in every direction, and saw snow falling on mountains to the west, and for an awful moment had a feeling that they were trapped, finally and inescapably trapped, in these endless, gloomy, hungry mountains. Above him now there was little living timber. The whole mountainside from here nearly to the summit was mostly a dead forest, killed by forest fires and mowed down by windstorms, looking like one huge logjam of dead spruces and lodgepoles, scattered like straw, studded with charred fir trunks still standing thirty to fifty feet tall amid the gray debris, softened only by new green pine growth and scrub a few feet tall. It was as bad a tangle as Fallen Timbers, and on a steep slope to boot.